“I almost visualized each of you being surrounded by love. It was weaving the circle of the four of us, weaving us together in love.”
This is how Olivia, one of my prayer group members, speaks of what she did during our half-hour meditation one afternoon last week. Sitting in her living room we closed our eyes and entered into this spiritual exercise for a half hour, as we have been doing regularly for the last three years.
After the bell rang for an end to last week’s session, I asked the other members – – Olivia, Donna, and Emerson – – to say what they do during the meditation. It was the first time I had posed this question, though I had long wondered.
On this occasion, Olivia was mourning the death, the day before, of a dear friend. She began by “dropping of my awareness into my heart center.” There she turned to “wishing her friend into the light.”
Then Olivia turned her attention toward her breathing. This helps her awareness to drop from her mind into her body. She established a rhythm for her breathing: in/out/; deep/slow. You discover an “inner smile” that says everything is OK, no matter what your mind is doing. The present moment, she comes to realize, is the only moment. She discovers within herself a sacred silence.
Olivia suddenly thinks about what she has to do but she recovers from this distraction by coming back and anchoring herself in the present.
Sometimes the meditation becomes boring and hard, she says. “But you deepen with insight and compassion. This is the grace. Out of the stillness spontaneously arises my love for other people and connection with them.”
For her, meditation is not self oriented or narcissistic. On the contrary, the “ego self vanishes and you connect with compassion for all people. It was very tender.”
Donna, for her part, recalls the way Hob, a member who died a year ago, used to lead us into meditation. “He had the capacity for leading us in such a natural way that we automatically went into a peaceful state,” she says.
She likes to use two phrases as mantras: “Come Holy Spirit” and “Come Lamb of God.” Repeating these words in her heart, Donna appreciates them as a gift. Through them and other spiritual exercises, she finds peace and joy.
And, yet, she sometimes finds it a relief when the appointed time of meditation ends. Serving as the ringer of the small bell to mark the end, she finds herself sometimes distracted by this task. “The last 10 minutes felt like 20,” she confesses.
Emerson describes his approach like this: “First I quiet myself and I feel the quietness going all over me. I do a prayer for everyone in the group. I come back to me and I wish myself happiness and good health.
“I then just sit and ward off those thoughts that I should be doing other things and what you are going to do when you leave. But I think of being content where I am.
“I think about family and other good things around me. I go through the names of my 11 grandchildren for two purposes: to be mindful of them and to remember their names when I see them.
“I never open my eyes during that time, it keeps me connected to the meditation. For me it’s being silent and feeling the energy from the group. It starts when we all sit down together. We’ve been doing it for a long time now and it feels like family.
“But I don’t stop thinking about everyday things. I call it mind chatter.”
Finally, I shared with the others some of my own experiences during the period of silence. “I can answer in one word what I do: nothing.” That is, I try to keep my mind free of thoughts while becoming present to the sacred and the holy that envelop us.
Like everyone else, I suffer distractions and often find the time of silence weighing on me, making me wish for the bell to ring. But I keep returning to the stillness of the interior heart in keeping with what others around me are doing.
Richard Griffin